The Philosophical Comparison Between Marketing and Social Media
There can be a correlation drawn between the changes in the philosophy of marketing and the philosophy of social media. From push to pull, bomber tactics to niche groups, they relate more than we know.
The Social Media world has been slowly switching from a single massive community to a niche community with a smaller membership status.
Myspace and Friendster blew up on the scene as massive social networks with the potential of connecting to hundreds of thousands of people. The best part about the massive networks was you weren’t limited to location to find “friends.”
With the advent of Facebook we saw the social media community moved to more of a nice, locale based system. You were catering to a friend base that may already exist in a specific geographic or social region. Facebook moved to a social interactive platform rather than a massive social community spread over a huge land base.
Now we have seen the power of NING unleashed upon the Internet world. With the introductions of NING came other sites like grou.ps. NING gave any layman the ability to create a very specific and niche social networks based around group specific ideas. Let’s say you were in a biking accident in Colorado. Try NING, I’m sure you will have a home.
Facebook has become increasingly more niche focused with application development and demographic/geographic targeted advertising. My definition of geographic would be the relation to a friend or connection. More often than not, they are in the same geographic location.
The philosophy behind marketing has moved in the same focus. What was once a bomber approach mentality of hitting as many people as possible to gain a sale. Is now switching to a more personal and direct market approach. We are not pushing a sales message at a demographic. We are now designing niche messages and a targeted story to PULL people toward us. Sell people on our offering.
Social media has followed the same path. Moving from a massive, no holds barred, network to a more niche community based system.
What is next? We have had discussion on Smaller Indiana around the concept of Web 3.0. What does Web 3.0 look to you? Is there a web 3.0? Maybe not.
Pikaba Flips the Internet Buyer Model
(hat tip to Mashable for the post)
Mashable randomly has a post where they feature an Internet startup. Most of the time I breeze through the post without it catching my eye but Pikaba caused me to slow down.
20 word description from Mashable: Pikaba is a social shopping community offering a reverse auction model where merchants bid for your shopping needs.
Brilliant! Talk about permission marketing at its finest! Pikaba is following the model of Insurance shopping companies on the web where you enter in what you want to pay and the Insurance companies quotes to GAIN your business.
When you join the Pikaba community you can submit a request of an item you are searching for and just wait. This gives sellers the ability to produce a service or product direct to a buyer. If the user base is large enough on Pikaba, this should be a simple decisions for merchants and sellers. This simple decision will only be simple if the buyers make up a large portion of the website.
From Mashable:
Pikaba is hoping to benefit both buyers and sellers by providing a marketplace that is built around consumer needs for defining an actual point of demand. The ads placed by those requesting items to purchase are similar to a regular classifieds ad, with description and images, etc.
I will be keeping my eye on Pikaba. It looks like a great example of social ingenuity at work!
Instant Gratification. A Misnomer on the Web.
There are a few blogs I read that I absolutely love and Seth Godin is one of them. Everything he writes is so simple and yet completely mind blowing. He wrote a post yesterday entitled, The Secret of the Web (hint: it’s a virtue).
Patience.
The main problem people have with social media is the time involvement.
“You are meaning to tell me I have to spend an hour a day on four different sites? Plus my blog?”
“It can be a half-hour but if you want to succeed. Yes”
Seth brought it all into perspective for me this morning by writing:The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang! But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.
A teaser. You can have all the friends in the world on Facebook but if you don’t have a strategy to cultivate the relationships, it is a waste of time. You can check out my post on how to be productive in Social Media here. But the main purpose of the post is this:
Don’t get caught up in the instant gratification of someone following you, commenting on your blog, or adding you to friendfeed. The fleeting moment of importance will be good for a day and then it will vanish. You will be swallowed up into the hole of web turnover. Whether personal or business make sure you have goals set before entering the social media arena.
It is like everything in life, more often than not, purpose can justify chaos. The web is chaotic and a tease. Tame the beast with patience and strategy.